Episode: 351 - WIN CYCLE by Purple Patch: Getting out of your comfort zone to improve leadership
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon introduces a new direction for the Purple Patch podcast, focusing on performance in life and work rather than just triathlon. He emphasizes the value of getting out of one's comfort zone, termed "win cycle," and how it applies to both athletes and professionals. Dixon shares stories of clients like Ben Cooper and Carmel Galvin who improved their lives and leadership skills through physical challenges. He outlines ten reasons why business leaders should take on physical challenges, including leading by example, fostering resilience, and enhancing team dynamics. Dixon also highlights the benefits of coaching for accountability and growth.
Matt Dixon introduces the new direction of the Purple Patch podcast, focusing on performance in life and work rather than just triathlon. Matt Dixon explains the "Win Cycle" concept, a high-performance corporate program inspired by principles used for world-class athletes. He Announces that the podcast will now feature "Win Cycle" episodes once a month, focusing on broader performance topics like leadership, business, and longevity.
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
:00-1:15 Promo
1:44-6:29 Intro
8:31-12:25 Ben Cooper Story
13:15-19:31 Why This Conversation Matters Now
20:15-23:10 Carmel Galvin
24:12-37:47 Tips on Coaching
38:30-40:58 Why Executives should take on a Challenge
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Today's show's a little different. Get used to it. Once a month, we are planning to do an episode of the Purple Patch podcast that is solely dedicated around performance in life and work. So we're going to put our DNA of triathlon to the side, and we're going to talk about leadership, performance across life, longevity, topics that have a broader reach and a wider perspective on performance. Now I think you're going to like today's show. It's all around the value of getting out of your comfort zone. And if today's messaging resonates, maybe you'd like to have me come speak to your team. Maybe work with your team around a high performance workshop. If that sparks any interest at all, I offer you to head to the website, go to the leadership tab, have a look at some of their offerings, and if you want me to come and talk, it'll be great. It'll be a lot of fun. Simply reach out info at Purple Patch fitness.com we do a lot of keynote speaking, some workshops and some broader performance programming for corporations and teams, it's getting a lot of traction. The demand is high, and it seems like we've done a pretty good job of it. All right, enjoy today's show. Remember info@purplepatchfitness.com if you want to continue the conversation at all, take care. I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time starved people everywhere integrate sport into life. You Matt and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever, your host, Matt Dixon, and welcome to a fresh, new Purple Patch podcast. You might have noticed the change. Do I hear some new tunes and that slight twist on the title, win cycle by Purple Patch, the value of getting out of your comfort zone, win cycle. What's that all about? Well, it's the banner name for our high performance corporate program, a new way for organization and teams to win if you're an athlete or at least a regular listener, the concept will probably feel pretty familiar to you. You see, we take the same principles that helped world class athletes sustain peak performance, and we apply those lessons through my coaching journey to everyday professionals. What comes out proven high performance on repeat, a win cycle where performance is almost inevitable. You see, here's what I've learned over the last 20 years of coaching, whether we're working with a world class athlete, a business leader, a time starved mum or parent, when we build a solid foundation, what we call the performance base layer, and we commit to a journey of learning and growth. Good things tends to happen. And the real magic, the amplifier of performance, that we see it across all avenues, is when we embrace a team approach. That's where things really go to the next level. And so when you and your team commit, you have the opportunity to enter a win cycle performance and results don't just become better. Instead, they become almost inevitable. And so for the title, well, we're labeling this episode as a win cycle episode, and you're going to begin to notice this across the titles of some of the shows of the Purple Patch podcast, as well as other educational content that we put out our blog, some LinkedIn posts that we're going to follow along. And we're doing this to try and help you, the listener and your expectations, to ensure that you can find the content that is relevant and most interesting to you. So what that's going to look like is about three of every four episodes of every month in this podcast, we're going to be focused around our DNA, our topics endurance athletes, high performance in sport, etc. But once a month, we're going to deliver deliberately differentiated wind cycle episodes. And these are deliberately not about triathlon performance. The lessons might emerge from our experiences of coaching triathletes, but we're going to be discussing performance across a broader perspective life and work, business leadership, longevity, life performance, by labeling these as wind cycle episodes and more broadly, win cycle educational content, we hope that will make it easier for you to find the content that's more exciting and relevant for you. Keep that in mind. So today, what we're going to do to kick this off our once monthly is we're going to dive into leadership a little bit, and we're going to discuss the power and the important. Sense of getting out of your comfort zone. What I like to label is simmering discomfort, poking your nose, and that's easy for me, poking your nose into the new frontier so that you what's the word that's right, grow. There couldn't be a more important and useful kickoff to our wind Cycle series, and so I hope that you enjoy over the course of today's show, you're going to learn why. First, the conversation around taking on physical challenges has so much relevance for you as a professional and as a leader and your role in work. Why is it relevant right now? Why should we care about this subject? And then we're going to break it down. I'm going to talk about my top 10 lists. There are 10 reasons why business leaders across all industries should really walk the walk and consider taking on a physical challenge, and on top of it, sharing that journey with their teams and their organizations, being really transparent about it. And finally, we're going to finish off with the role of coaching in this of how you can leverage coaching to maximize the impact and the effect, not just on your own journey, but in the broader perspective of culture at your organization. It's pretty powerful one. Now, along the way, I'm going to tell you some stories, and it's going to become a little more useful, but it's going to be a lot of fun as well. I hope to make it simple and actionable. It's all in today's show, and we label the main part of the show as ever, the meat and potatoes. Yes, the meat and potatoes. I'm going to be talking about high performance today, and I'm going to dig into the value of getting out of your comfort zone. And you might think around some of the stories, because I'm going to endorse climbing Kilimanjaro or entering a Spartan Race, or competing in an Ironman or a marathon or something like that. And as soon as you hear those sorts of challenges, you might think, Oh, my goodness me, I'm not an athlete. But let me tell you, the opportunity for you as a leader is not based on your athletic ability whatsoever. You don't need to be an athlete to lean into the lessons of today, I'm going to give you an example. I think this example is a great anecdote around the fact that we're not talking about elite athletics. I want you to smash in your mind for the thought of the stereotype of the lean, ripped athletic CEO that just loves doing these huge challenges, and just think about someone pretty normal that's going along the journey. I'm going to talk about an athlete that I coach and I've got the greatest respect for now, he's been on the show before, and if you missed the episode, I invite you to go back and listen to my interview with Ben Cooper, if you missed it, it's really relevant to this now, because when I started to Coach Ben, Ben was a new father. He had a very busy and demanding job in commercial real estate, private equity, and he was traveling all over Europe every week, multiple cities. He was spinning a lot of plates, and he found himself really out of a wind cycle. He was overwhelmed. He had some mental health challenges. He wasn't in great shape. He wasn't sleeping well. He was reliant on business dinners, maybe a little too much alcohol, and he certainly wasn't performing at his best, and I think it was at a crossroads in many ways. And when Ben first came to me, we had a stuttering start, because I really encourage him to adopt some simple strategies and behaviors around hydration, daily movement, exercise. And he got going, but it was sporadic, on and off. He didn't have mission. He didn't have purpose. And after he fell off the wagon a few times, I said, you need a challenge. You just get out of your comfort zone. Here. You're falling into complacency. You're sitting in a place of comfort, and you need to step out, you need to take risk, and that's really, really challenging for someone that is already overwhelmed. But Ben went and thought about it, and he decided to enter a marathon, way bigger on a challenge than I would have anticipated. And he wanted to do it because of a purpose, because his little boy, when he was born, had a condition. He said, I'm going to raise money for a charity that really supports kids with similar conditions. And he assumed, when he took on that challenge, competing in the London Marathon, that he was going to hate every single step along the journey. So what Ben did is he committed. He certainly really was. That motivated, that didn't strike, but he got committed, and he had absolute anticipation that he was going to hate every step, but he was going to do it. And so we started with really small steps, walking into running, little bit of strength. We started to build little victories. And after just a few months, something started to happen. He started to feel like he had a little more control in his life, and the commitment proved to be the thing that was the framework to drive greater effectiveness in organization across his week. He brought in his wife, they partnered together to ensure that they could work their schedules out. They started to eat a little bit better. He started to reduce his alcohol. He started to build a little bit of tissue resilience and fitness. He started to feel the benefit of greater energy. He started to have fun. And ironically, by the time he crossed the finish line in a really respectable time in his first marathon in London, he realized that the reward was actually the journey itself, and it opened up perspective for Ben. Now he's just done he's now done three marathons. He's training for another one right now, and the impact that it's had has expanded well beyond the pride, the satisfaction, the sense of accomplishment of crossing the finish line in each of those marathons. Yeah, he's getting faster each time, but that's kind of not it, because it's driving him as a leader. It's enabling him to show up better across all aspects of his life, including as a partner and as a father, and he's starting to be a catalyst of inspiration to his other teammates. You see, you don't need to be an elite athlete to leverage and build out a high performance approach to life and foster many of the benefits that really emerge by getting out of your comfort zone and taking on a challenge, what you need is a little bravery and courage, maybe a little kick up the backside sometimes, and some commitment. And when you do that, transformation can begin to emerge. Now, before we dive into my top 10 list of reasons my persuasion for you, if you're a business professional, that you're sitting in your comfort zone, maybe you do regularly go to the gym. Maybe you do think about prioritizing sleep. Maybe you are being conscious about your eating habits. But are you really challenge driven right now, before I start to give you my sales pitch on that through 10 core reasons, as a business leader that you should consider this, we should first pause and think about, why do we even care about this conversation anyway? You know what's what's important to it right now, I think it's a really important moment, as we're going through a lot of change, geopolitically, socially, we're still emerging from a pandemic. But there are three main reasons that I think about this being relevant right now. The first is, when we look at employee basis across many industries, the consistent pattern that we see is rising burnout and folks feeling overwhelmed. It's likely no surprise to you, if you're a business professional, the rates of burnout are an all time high. There's a disassociation between employees and organizations, and demands for those employees, they're not lowering life isn't getting any easier. In fact, the pressure keeps ranking up, ranking up, ranking up. Many people are feeling really overwhelmed. And what I started to see, and what we coach to is those that are actually being successful, that are navigating these elevated demands, that are showing up. They've had the realization that when we use the word performance, it's not just about work, it's about energy, mindset, well, being the old work life balance, thing that is fading as a paradigm. What's necessary is to have an integrated life. You see who we are as a business professional is ultimately who we take home with us in the evening. We don't put it all aside. Those days are over. And so for you to feel successful and generate results at work, you also need to be fulfilled as a human being. And in fact, it's not a luxury to think about your personal well being and your health. It's a prerequisite for you to consistently show up every day in the workplace. And so this integrated approach is the wave of high performance, not just in work, but in life. It is the time for this. And so I think it's really necessary. Sorry for us to start to take action on that. I think a second thing that's really relevant to the times in this conversation is pairing it with a really interesting observation around what I might label the midlife awakening. There is a cultural shift happening, and maybe it's because I'm a man that's in my low 50s. But there is no doubt right now that folks in their 40s, their 50s and beyond, are absolutely rejecting the idea that aging means slowing down, we're not on this drag, gradual descent into just having an allotment and pretending to become happy and seeing out the last days of our life, we're still thirsty for accomplishment, for growth, and when we talk about challenges today, I really believe that if you are moving into your 40s, 50s and beyond, a physical challenge can be a great catalyst for reinvention. In a few weeks, I'm going to welcome a guest onto this show, and that guest is the author, Gwendolyn bounce of not too late, a woman who, in her mid 40s, took up Spartan racing. It changed her life. You can look forward to that, but I think it is the absolute epicenter of what we're going to talk about in today's show. I also believe the third big element of why this conversation is important is the increasing disconnect that we have in our lives. I see it here in the Purple Patch Performance Center, the need for real connection. You see, we live in a hyper digital world, and yet, people, more and more are craving in person, community and shared experiences, and believe it or not, physical challenges, whether it is obstacle course racing like Gwendolyn or triathlon or team based endurance events, they can create deep bonds that very few activities can. It's no wonder that me that 30 years ago, some in college still have the tightest bond with those teammates, because I went through great challenge together in a shared mission. And if you were an ex collegiate or high school athlete, you probably have similar memories. And so this is why this conversation is so important, and it's also why I always endorse the old B hag, big, hairy, audacious goal, or to put more simply, committing to a big, physical challenge, getting out of your comfort zone. When I think about the Purple Patch coaching model, or the model of what we call the wind cycle, there are three main components. The first is, if you want to excel at anything in life, world class athletes, pretty obvious, but also business professional, it is absolutely critical that you show up with a robust physical foundation of health. That's what we built Purple Patch on. I want my athletes to be healthy and in a C suite, executive or business professional lens, that means stabilizing and elevating energy, enhancing cognitive function and building a really robust immune system so you can stay in the game, and you also have capacity to step up when it but when it really demands physically. That's what we call a performance base, like it starts with you and the physical. The second part of the model is the traits of a high performance mindset, and this includes all of the things that you are familiar with as a high performer, resilience, adaptability, a growth mindset coach, ability, the ability to filter, out distractions or prioritize traits that help you perform under pressure and step up no matter what is thrown at you, and that is almost the yin and yang. They connect together, the physical and the mindset. That's what high performance is made of. But what I've learned over 20 years is the final component is the wonderful reinforcement mechanism, the ability and pathway to take it to a whole nother level, and that's team taking things to a whole new level with the reinforcement and results amplification by adopting a team approach. I did this with the Purple Patch pros, and it was the catalyst for our great performance factory results that we had over more than a decade. And I also applied it to all of the very busy executives who love the concepts around mindset and for performance baseline, but applied it to their teams to help them show up better, to fall into their own win cycles. And it turns out that winning is really, really fun. And so this model that we talk about the three components, performance, baseline, high performance, mindset, Team interlocking to create the win cycle. It's not theoretical. It's just a representation of the simple expression of what I've observed happening and working to drive some of the world's greatest athletes to sustained high performance across two decades. Eight, but also helped many leading executives gain an edge in the workplace and in broader life. It works. Let me tell you another story, and then we're going to dive into the top 10. A great friend of mine, another guest on the Purple Patch podcast. In fact, she's been on twice. Very few people get that badge of honor. Carmel Galvin, this is one of my favorites. When I first met Carmel, who is a highly seasoned, respected and incredibly accomplished head of people, head of HR currently at Klaviyo, before that stripe, before that Autodesk, has a long, rich history at the top tier of business performance. When I met Carmel. She was terrified of water. In fact, when we were in Hawaii together, she could hardly put her toe in the water's edge at the beach. She had a very real fear of water. You know what she did? She set up the commitment to say, I need to overcome this, and I'm going to learn how to swim now. That is the epitome of getting out of your comfort zone, way out of your comfort zone. She bought a pair of fins, she got a snorkel. She took some very basic swim lessons. She started chest deep fear in juicing itself. Managed to make it a whole 25 a whole lap, and slowly and slowly and slowly, built it over time. Now she also lent into team. She started to become a part of our twice weekly master swim program. Extended it to three times a week. Started to build the miles, and she started to develop confidence control. She navigated the huge stress that that brought on. She started to develop tools that she didn't realize that she had, and that tool, that set of tools that really emerged, are really interesting, because she didn't become a great leader, because she learned how to swim. That isn't the lesson here. She's already really smart, she's committed, highly experienced, etc. But that experience, and it was a long arc of a journey, it delivered this constant exposure and experiences that serve to ignite and polish existing traits already in her because those traits are not genetic, they're not innate, they're in all of us. And what she started to have is a toolkit of character traits that then she could apply to any arena in her life. And of course, one of the most important arenas is her as a leader. And so when she had similar stress inducing fear inducing episodes in the workplace, she had those traits embedded in her ignited easy to utilize and draw on. And of course, the journey itself, with the little failures and setbacks and challenges and fears. It helped provide empathy. You see you as a leader. When you take on a challenge, you leverage a cross pollination impact that can permeate through your team and ultimately your organization, no matter how much we might wish that it's just about us. It's not this isn't about you. You see if you're listening as a leader, here is some food for thought on how taking an honor challenge a personal challenge, can create a ripple effect through, ultimately, your organization. And I believe the most wonderful challenge you can take on is a physical challenge. So many athletes that I work with or executives that I work with do it, whether it's Everest killer man Jaro, a big hiking holiday, a riding trip in Europe, a high rocks, a Spartan Race, whatever it might be, they create a direct and powerful cross pollination effect across personal athletic pursuits and leadership in the workplace. So let's dig in. We're going to go through and I'm going to give you my top 10 list. Very simple. Number one, leading by example. You as a leader. When you take on a challenge, you are modeling high performance behaviors. I don't think we realize this. If you are leading a team, or if you're a part of the C suite, leading an organization, you are, whether you like it or not, a role model. People look to you, and they look at how you talk, behave, act, respond, etc. When executives commit to really structured challenges, despite their workload, they are setting a powerful example for teams. It's their ability to prioritize health, discipline, resilience, demonstrate. Means that sustained high performance requires more than just going through work. It normalizes self care, personal well being, goal setting in parallel to work, goals, perseverance, encouraging their teams to adopt similar habits when you do this yourself and you invest in your personal performance, whether you like it or not. You inspire teams to take ownership of their own energy, well being, productivity. It creates a culture just a spark of a culture of long term, sustainable success over burnout. Walk the walk first. It's why, when I work with leadership teams, we always talk about putting your own oxygen mask on first. Point number one, point number two. As a leader, this is a benefit. You are kick starting the development of a culture of two great buzzwords right now around performance, resilience and adaptability. Now we won't go into anti fragile versus resilience. I understand that that's really important, but I'm going to use the more commonly used phrase resilience and adaptability. Endurance Sports, physical challenges, getting hell of your comfort zone. It pushes you as a leader. It pushes you through discomfort, inevitable setbacks, problem solving and even problem solving under fatigue. These experiences are first hand that setbacks are not failures, but instead learning opportunities. And when you start to have that, it sparks greater resilience. And when you bring this to your organization, you start to have the ability to create teams that embrace challenges, that adjust quickly to the obstacles develop. What's that phrase? Duck worth Come on. What is it? Oh, that's right. Grit. This shifts culture from fear based to decision making to growth, innovation, adaptability, and I think it's huge. If you want resilience and adaptability, you can't tell your teams to be more resilient. You need to live it, infuse it culturally personal challenges can also, number three, strengthen team dynamics and collaboration. Training with a team enforces trust, accountability, shared effort. This is why I love team challenges or working with buddies, key elements that a high performing business teams have, in fact, in our model, when we talk about team, at the core of it is trust and mechanisms of great support and accountability, and executives and team members learn to depend on each other, celebrate collective wins, recognize the strengths of their teammates, and it has a huge impact when you do this in parallel, using sport and physical challenges as a vehicle, the lessons can carry over into leadership, helping and foster a more inclusive, collaborative, safe environment in many ways, where every member can feel more valued and empowered. Point number four, as a leader, emphasizing prioritization, what I like to call ruthless focus, when I think back to the Purple Patch pro athletes, I always talked about, our success isn't built on what we're going to add into this. It's what we can remove. It's why I want our one of our predominant sayings was, nail the basics. Such an important thing. If you can master these seven fundamentals, you're 95% in the way there, and that's what we're obsessing when you take on in a very busy time starved life, quite often with family at home as well, that you need to really focus and show up for you've got to be really focused on what matters most. And that is an art that is a habit of being able to filter out distractions and focus on the boulders, not the sad. When you go through this in sport, how do your comfort zone where it's a necessity? I guarantee you you're going to bring that clarity to your team, helping them cut through noise, prioritize the high impact work. Get rid of the distractions. What does that recall? Clarity, efficiency, role, definition. Reduce burnout. It's huge. We don't want chaos. We want a culture of clarity and focus. Point number five, developing a growth mindset, a learning mindset. Coachability, I always talk about one of the most important traits of high performance is the humility of being coachable. Executives are typically in a place of leadership, but stepping into an athlete's role suddenly you're a student again, and you're leveraging quite often. A coach to help you on that journey where you're going to have to embrace feedback, trusting a process, understanding the value of expert guidance. This humility tends to translate into enhancing listening skills, greater greater openness to feedback, and a culture that valuable values continuous learning over ego. The greatest athletes that I've worked with, the ones that differentiate themselves, tend to have the right mindset, and as a part of that, are the most coachable. I guarantee you, if you name almost every great athlete in the world of sport, whether it's Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Simone parks, highly coachable. It's a common trait, one that people miss. And some of the best known leaders that I've worked with internationally known are humble. They want to learn. They lean into expertise. When you take on a challenge, it fosters this trait. We're halfway through number six, creating a performance culture that values energy and recovery. There's a reason that I got labeled the recovery coach. It wasn't because I wanted my athletes to be lazy. It wasn't because I thought there was a short term success. It was that I wanted their hard work that was a prerequisite to be effective, and that extends to any arena in life. When you commit to endurance, training, physical challenges, whatever it might be, you have to balance the stress that is necessary to prepare for them with adequate recovery. You see, true performance is not a sprint. It's not about endless effort. It's strategic effort with proper rest and calibration. And when you take this in whack, it's a slap around the face. I can't tell you how many executives have learned these lessons the hard way, injury, fatigue, burnout, and when they come to us, and I help them, and we start to infuse recovery in a more strategic way. They tend to look in the mirror at themselves as a leader. They look at their organizations. Are we just working hard, or are we working effectively? Because it's not about high performance or peak performance, it's sustained high performance. That's what a win cycle is. So we don't celebrate overwork, of the machismo toughness we celebrate, celebrate strategic work, proper breaks to drive to sustainable output. Boom. Number seven, here's the list, reinforcing the power of commitment and goal setting. You see physical challenges. It rewires how you think. We don't think about ambitious goals. We see massive objectives that are not accomplished by one big, short sprint. The truth is about success in these physical challenges, getting out of your comfort zone is it's not a quick fix, it's not six weeks, it's not eight weeks, about 12 weeks. It's the long arc of strategic habit development and commitment. And this mindset absolutely transfers directly to your teams, encouraging them to take on big goals, but then ensuring that you go through stepping stone, manageable steps to get there. It has real meaning when we say, embrace the journey, the passion of the process. We're ambitious. We're looking for results. We're driven by outcomes and wins, but we're focused on the process, and so that really helps when you have that school of learning in parallel to all of your roles. The final little one, when executives take on challenges, the impact leads far beyond your personal transformation. It helps how you lead, how you inspire, how you create environments where teams can thrive. These experiences foster resilient, high performing cultures where people are empowered to challenge themselves, work together, pursue ambitious goals without sacrificing well being. And so this is a critical component. Now, I started this episode saying I'm going to give you my top 10 list, but that was eight, so I'm just going to carry on with it. I guess I mapped out eight key lessons. I think I must have accumulated something in there, but let's go with it today. Eight lessons. There you go. You'll have to wait for the final two folks, eight lessons of high performance growth. It starts with you as a leader, whether you're leading a. Team, whether you're the owner of a coffee shop or whether you're leading an international organization, put your own oxygen mask on first. But make no mistake that your role modeling and setting up the environment can have a ripple effect across the entire organization and team that you're leading. So let's just finish today with a couple of thoughts on coaching. Why is coaching so valuable? You decide to do it, you can go and find a training plan to train for your half marathon, or get ready for a hike, or even download off of chat, GTP, a nice program for high rocks. Why would you think about coaching as you go through this? Well, you got you got a lot of competing demands, and you've got very limited time. Most of the executives that I work with their most important commodity time. Time starved leaders don't typically have the bandwidth to really experiment with trial and error. So often the first obvious place of a coach is to provide a structure, program and approach to go there, and it should be broader than just the training sessions that they're doing. You also need to think about filtering out the blizzard of information that's there around prioritizing sleep, eating habits, hydration, recovery and more filtering out and just like we talked about with our pros, removing the sand, the distractions and just getting the boulders right. And so coaching should be valuable in that a second value of coaching is accountability. Stay in the course. You see, executives are typically used to leading others, but when it comes to your own development, external accountability is really crucial. A coach really ensures that you stay consistent. It's going to help you stay on track, even when work pressures escalate, because you need this stuff when work pressures escalate, training with the team is going to foster commitment when others are expecting you, skipping a session becomes much harder, and so don't underestimate the power of support and accountability. The third element of coaching that I think is sometimes missed is growth through learning. So many executives operate in environments where they are the domain expert they've got there for a reason. They're very smart, but being coach forces you into that learner's mindset, and it develops a certain humility, and that is such a key trait for leadership growth. I've had some of the most powerful relationships with athletes that I've coached, executive athletes, where they've lent into coaching and embraced being a student. Don't underestimate it. And the final component around coaching is stress relief, emotional support. It can be really, really lonely at the top, and this outlet, endurance training provides a powerful catalyst. Training partners, coaches can often provide a really organic support system, a political venue where you can decompress, exchange insights, share struggles. Perhaps these connections often extend well beyond sport, providing a really strong foundation for both professional but also personal growth. When we think about this more broadly, I strongly believe that if you're an executive, a business professional, a leader of any sort, getting out of your comfort zone and committing to a challenge is one of the most powerful things that you can do. And let me reinforce this, this is not about you becoming an athlete. You don't need to be already good. In fact, you can be the brightest spark of inspiration. If you are currently sedentary. All you need to do is commit. You need to commit and you need to take the first step. And it can be a fear inducing step, where you think, I have no idea, what am I doing here. I've never been an athlete in my life, but take a step and build a little victory on one area. Maybe it's just walking around your neighborhood every evening. Maybe it's a prioritization on better sleep with a little bit of movement. Maybe it's joining just a strength session twice a week, whatever it is. But take the first step, and as you build and you start to get the little benefits of energy and confidence and control. You can add to it and take the long term approach, but put a stake in the ground and share publicly. This is what I'm doing. There are many people that I've coached that are unbelievable at this. Sami inkonen, a physiological. Freak CEO and founder of Trulia, and in the same year that Trulia went public, the amateur IRONMAN champion. It is an amazing case study of high performance, but for many employees or team members or other leaders, it feels out of touch. It's almost not human. It's just incredible. And I've often found that folks that are currently sedentary or and I mean this in the greatest respect, highly mediocre, are the ones that are most accessible, most inspiring, and can have the biggest ripple effect on the culture of an organization. You don't need to get your name in lights, you don't need victories or podiums. You need to commit and get out of your comfort zone, simmering discomfort, because I tell you this productivity and results in anything. Never emerge from a place of comfort. It is when we step out into the frontier and we get into that simmering discomfort that the magic occurs with a perspective, I hope that helps. It is today's show the wind cycle reminder again, folks, if you would like to continue this conversation, if you want to learn more about myself as a speaker, we have a lot of fun with our workshops, simply reach out info@purplepatchfitness.com Until then, back to regular programming next week. Take care, guys. Thanks so much for joining and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there. And you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also Share It With Your Friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice, positive review in the comments. Now, any questions that you have, let me know, feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com, or leave it in the comments of the show at the Purple Patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, and so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, Let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community with that. I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do, take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
performance workshops, leadership topics, comfort zone, high performance, team approach, physical challenges, business leaders, resilience, adaptability, growth mindset, energy recovery, commitment, goal setting, coaching benefits, integrated life